SAO PAULO – Tickets for Saturday’s UFC on FX 7 event didn’t as sell as quickly as promotion officials had hoped, but UFC Managing Director of International Development Marshall Zelaznik said the card will likely produce a sellout and that UFC returns to Brazil are likely for both May and June of this year.

“We’re getting close (to a sellout),” Zelaznik told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “Will every seat be sold? I don’t know. It will probably get into the realm of what we call a sellout, which means a few hundred tickets from being totally sold out.

“The tickets were slow, and we’re used to seeing them just pop here. But the tickets here just kept going and going and going.”

Featuring a middleweight headliner between Vitor Belfort and Michael Bisping, UFC on FX 7 takes place Saturday at Sao Paulo’s Ibirapuera Gymnasium, which Zelaznik said has been scaled for approximately 9,000 fans.

In the past 17 months, four previous visits to the country have seen brisk ticket sales. That has not been the case in Sao Paulo, which has not hosted a UFC event since 1998.

Zelaznik said the company may have simply chosen the wrong time to visit the country’s largest city.

“This is their summer,” Zelaznik explained. “Sao Paulo, everyone leaves. What I’m learning now is that it’s sort of like being in Europe in August: You just don’t do events. So even though we’re going to do great – we’ve done great revenue and the ticket sales will be great, and the arena will look fantastic – I think we probably would have been wiser to be in the South for this event.

“Nevertheless, there’s still a lot of interest in the event. The papers are reporting on it, and the tickets are going well, and they’re picking up in this last week.”

Zelaznik’s point was illustrated by a crowd of more than 100 media member’s at Thursday pre-event press conference in Sao Paulo – a figure generally reached in the U.S. only by the largest pay-per-view events. A few of the local Brazilian media members pointed out the cost of the tickets, which ran between R$400 and R$1,200 (approximately $200 to $600 U.S.), as a potential contributing factor to the slower-than-normal sales, but Zelaznik was quick to point out that when hosting events in smaller arenas, ticket prices must be adjusted to generate the revenue necessary to cover the costs of the event.

“It’s just a matter of making the numbers work,” Zelaznik said. “These events are expensive to bring here. We’re bringing a lot of people over, basically all the fighters, and so it just takes a lot of money and a lot of personnel to make these events happen.

“We’re trying to make the numbers work to make sure the event is successful on every front.”

Despite the apparent challenges of the UFC’s fifth event in Brazil since August 2011, Zelaznik said the promotion is still bullish on the nation and is currently evaluating Brasilia, Florianopolis, Fortaleza and Porto Alegre as future host cities for returns to Brazil in both May and June, with the latter likely serving as the finale for “The Ultimate Fighter: Brazil 2″ and featuring a headliner between opposing coaches Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Fabricio Werdum.

“Brazil has truly become the UFC’s second home,” Zelaznik said. “We’ve got very big plans for the coming year.

“We’re going to bring it to every region. … We’re going to inspect venues after the event. We’ve got big planning meetings that are going this week to get everything locked down.”

Zelaznik said a stadium show, which the UFC had hoped to host in 2012, is still a possibility, as are arena events of all sizes. The exec also credited the purchase of a custom rigging device first seen at this past year’s UFC 147 event in Belo Horizonte for opening up several venues throughout Brazil that the company had previously assumed would not be capable of hosting an event.

“We bought that,” Zelaznik said of the rigging. “That’s here in Brazil full-time. It opens up the world to us to go to other venues. That’s why were doing another look at all the venues we thought we couldn’t go into before.”

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